MOSES LAKE - It's time for immediate action to stop the decline of the Odessa Subarea and assure continued irrigation of at least a portion of the region's agricultural land.

So says Darryll Olsen with the Columbia-Snake River Irrigators Association (CSRIA), who shared a plan to bring more surface water to the area during a recent Moses Lake Chamber of Commerce meeting.

"We've reached the point where the Bureau of Reclamation estimates in the next five to seven years, 70 percent of the entire Odessa Subarea is either not going to have access to groundwater, or the costs to get it will be so much that nobody can afford it," Olsen said. "There have already been wells taken offline. This is happening, it's real."

Early this year, at the request of local and state officials, CSRIA engineers and economists brought their expertise to bear on the issue and came up with a surface water alternative that could take some of the pressure off a fast dwindling aquifer.

Instead of concentrating on the entire Subarea, the CSRIA chose to focus on bringing surface water to about 750,000 acres north of Interstate 90, which Olsen said won't require nearly as much capital as completing a major retrofit to the canal south of I-90.

In a perfect world, the entire area would be irrigated for crop production, Olsen said, but reality shows the vast amount of federal and state dollars needed for such a large scale project won't be forthcoming anytime soon.

"It's just a matter of hard core economics," he said. "It's going to cost a lot of public sector money to go down and develop the area south of I-90, while this area up here can be developed at a lower cost with private sector funding. We're not going to save all the ground in the Odessa Subarea north and south, but there is adequate capacity to go north without infringing upon the ability to develop the southern portion at some point if there's money to do it."

The principal concern for the CSRIA is making sure irrigated land in Eastern Washington doesn't evaporate, and Olsen said every acre of production lost affects not only the immediate area, but the entire region.

"Our view is, it does not help Eastern Washington agriculture or our communities if one irrigated acre goes out of production anywhere," he said. "We don't care if it's Okanagan, Walla Walla, Odessa, Snake River or Yakima."

He and others are also concerned about the message sent to food processors if irrigated land is allowed to slip away.

"Pulling irrigated acreage out of production is the wrong message to send to companies that have international capabilities and are asking, 'Do we want to be in the Columbia Basin or Brazil? Who's got the economic horsepower to keep us there?'" Olsen said.

The association has now gone through most of the necessary regulatory hurdles for the project, with plans to break ground next year and fire up the pumps in 2014. At that time, Olsen said he hopes to see an initial 30,000 acres of new surface water "protecting and preserving" agricultural lands.

The CSRIA has been working with agricultural lenders and irrigators to arrange total private sector financing of the project, Olsen said. They've also been sending letters to landowners in the area, asking if they want to be included in the plan, and expect to have a final funding package put together by mid July.

"Nobody ever really expects to meet Judgement Day," Olsen said. "We all say we want to do this irrigation project, but when someone comes up and says 'it's today' and asks you to write checks for the next 20 years - reasonable checks, but checks - it's kind of a shock. Now is the time to decide if we're going to step up and move forward with this."

For more information visit www.csira.org.